POPULAR CHRONICLES No Drinking at any time while you are at thIS pageant. No exceptions. You must keep in mInd that this is a children's pageant and conduct yourselves accordingly. I N a stroller in the lobby was Nina from Montgomery, who had a tiny pink face and tiny gold earrings and a scram- ble of fine red hair. Her pageant dress was still on its hanger She was napping in a pink sleep suit and a pair of Tweetie Bird shoes Her mother, Kris Ragsdale, had a long dark braid and a steady, so- bering gaze. While she talked, she moved Nina's stroller back and forth, the way you move a vacuum cleaner. Kris told me that she was eighteen and Nina was eight months old. She'd got into pageants this past winter, when she took Nina to the Jefferson Davis Pageant and the Christ- mas Angel Pageant in Montgomery at the urging of a friend. Kris had never been in a pageant when she was a kid. She mostly lived in foster homes or on her own since she was little, and she got married when she was sixteen. Her hus- band, James, was dressed In a loose heavy- metal-band T -shirt and an Orlando Magic hat, and he said he worked in Mont- h " H ' gomery as a saw s arpener. e s got a pretty good job," Kris said, rocking the stroller. "Still, I mean, we can hardly save a penny." Until recently, Kris and James shared an apartment with James's ex- girlfriend, James's little son, David, and James's ex-girlfriend's daughter, to save on rent. It cost thirty-five dollars just to enter today's beauty competition, and there were extra fees to enter the contest for Most Photogenic, Most Beautiful, Best Dress, Dream Girl, and Western Wear. There was also the Supreme Spe- cial-fifty dollars for all categories except Dream Girl and Western Wear. The fees for national pageants are higher. It costs a hundred and seventy-five dollars to reg- ister for the Southern Charm national, and between fifty and a hundred dollars to enter each special category, like Super- star Baby, Talent, Additional Talent, and Southern Belle. Kris said she'd bought the Supreme Special for Nina today. "You save the money with the Supreme," she explained. "You don't get the West- ern Wear, but we don't do Western Wear with her yet anyway The hats are too big for her." She lifted Nina out of the stroller and started changing her carefully into a stiff royal-blue dress. "My mom got this for me," Kris said. "It was guess how much. Sixty dollars reduced to forty." \ A woman nearby who heard us talk- ing came over and said to Kris, "Honey, you have to meetJoni Deal. She rents out all sorts of dresses and Western clothes and everything. She'll rent you something nice for the pageants." The woman was here with her granddaughter Rhiannon, who was named for a Fleetwood Mac song and was three years old and big for her age. Rhiannon had been in dozens of pageants and usually won everything ex- cept fashion. 'We're doing something about that, though," her grandmother said. 'We've got something really nice now for her dress. We're not talking about a Kathie Lee off-the-rack-from- Wal-Mart dress, either. I bought her a plain old dress, and then I went to the bridal section at a fabric store and bought a whole lot of trim and beading, and I got out that glue gun and did it myse1E" She looked at Kris and then said, "For us, los- .. ." Ing IS not an optIon. "If we take Nina to the nationals, we're going to have to get her something th ' 1 " J . d " s at s more e egant, ames saJ. ome- thing more frilly. The judges kill for frilly." In the meantime, Kris said, they had to save for future entry fees, although James hopes they will be able to find a lo- cal business that will sponsor Nina; some- one told him that a business could claim beauty-pageant fees as a tax deduction. He mentioned that both Nina and Da- vid, his little boy, had been offered mod- elling contracts. "It sounded good," he said, "but it cost about six hundred and fifty dollars just to sign up, and then you had to buy all the makeup and the mod- elling kit, too, so we decided not to do it." He brightened for a moment. "Some- thing good is definitely going to happen for Nina and David, I think," he said. "Nina's got the pageants, and my ex-girlfriend's talk- ing to some guy right now at Extra Model Manage- ment who says he thinks he might be able to get a sit- com for David. That would really be great, but I think it would mean moving to N ew York, and I don't know how I feel about moving." "It's hard doing pageants, because of the money, but it's worth it," Kris said. "} mean, everybody likes to show off their daughter, right? It's fun for us, and she re- ally enjoys it. It's mother-daughter time, and I know someday we won't have that as much. We're putting all her pageant 33 pictures and scorecards in a scrapbook, so she can have it, and someday she'll be able to see it and all her trophies and say, 'Gee, I did that!' It gives her something she can be proud ot" The pageant was about to start, and Kris stood up and attached a bow to Nina's wisps of hair. Nina didn't have enough hair to hold a regular barrette, so Kris had devised something clever with a piece of a zipper she'd cut from a Zip-loc bag. She said she realized that some peo- ple might not like pageants, because they thought children shouldn't be exposed to competition this early in their lives, but she and James thought it would be good for Nina-it would give her a head start, especially if Nina wanted to try for Miss America someday. Kris said, "I know it's a lot of pressure, but, I mean, you know, you're under some kind of pressure your whole entire life." D ARLENE likes her pageants to start with the babies, because they're at their best in the morning. ''You have to do it that way," she said. "Babies just will not put up with an all-day pageant" The room for the competition looked festive. A blue-and-white Southern Charm ban- ner was hanging on the back wall, and be- side it was a table loaded with crowns and trophies of all different sizes. The crowns were as big as birthday cakes and were studded with rhinestones. The biggest ones cost almost two hundred dollars apiece. 'When Becky was in pageants, she was always getting these so-so crowns," Darlene had complained to me. "I don't want that reputation, so I spend r " a lortune on my crowns. The judges were two big-boned women with layered haircuts and soft faces For a few minutes, they murmured to each other, and then looked at Stacie with solemn ex- pressions and nodded The mothers brought their ba- bies forward one by one and held them facing out toward the judges, fluffing the babies' skirts into meringues of chif- fon that billowed up and over the moth- ers' arms and the babies' dangling legs. Displayed this way, the babies looked weightless and relaxed and sublime, sus- pended in midair. The judges studied them and scored them in the individual categories while Stacie read introduc- tions: ''This is Cheyenne. Her hobbies are